Florida SEO: A Story of a Disappointing Keyword

A Story of a [disappointing] Keyword

It’s been a few years now since we’ve launched our company. I remember when we first made this page we thought that being a “Florida SEO Company” was going to be the way to market ourselves.

Boy were we wrong!

We worked on promoting our company and doing all the right things to make ourselves known for this keyword. About a year later, we wound up ranking for the coveted term “Florida SEO” and thought the leads would start pouring in.

Wrong again.

Turns out the keyword and traffic volume for the keyword [Florida SEO] has been greatly inflated by none other than SEO’s themselves constantly doing queries to see where they are.

keywords like this and their bids are driven up and inflated by our very own industry.

That number has probably tripled since 2010 when we first started doing keyword research.

Florida SEO: No One Cares

Last month I checked in to see where we were ranking for this coveted keywords and noticed we got pushed back to page 2. Normally I’d be pretty upset about this but I really did not care.

We never got any leads from this keyword. In fact, we ran a PPC campaign to target the exact keyword “Florida SEO” and you know what we got? Nothing. Zilch. We ran it for 2 weeks, on several different landing pages. We even ran a free SEO audit and got nothing at all.

The fact of the matter is, if you are trying to bring in new business for your company, keywords like Florida SEO are not the way to go.

What We Do Care About

On the other hand, traffic for our site has more than tripled over the past year. This is mainly due to our blog and our commitment to the whitehat way of life. We’ve also been promoting ourselves on social networks such as Google+ and Twitter, which have yielded tons of traffic for us.

Traffic for the Elite Strategies website over the last few years.

We have been blessed with the fact that our online marketing strategy has paid off 10 fold. We’ve ignored “shortcuts” that we’ve seen other websites and have been lucky enough to stay in the good graces of Google penalty free for over 4 years.

I’m not going to give away all my cards in this post, but keywords like “Florida SEO” and “state SEO” just aren’t that great. The posts that we write (that rank) that solve a problem are the ones that really earn.

We’ve signed new clients as a result of a new post.

We’ve hired new employees as a result of a new post.

We’ve obtained new vendors as a result of a post.

The Florida SEO keyword has consistently disappointed us over time.

The Florida SEO Job Market

The one thing that we have seen about this keyword is that a lot of SEO’s tend to use it. We’ve gotten a ton of job inquiries as a result of it over the years. Although since “not provided” started happening we haven’t been able to tell as much :/.

On that note, we ran a small case study of sorts on the Florida SEO Job market via Craigslist. We ran queries for January of 2014 to see how many job postings there were per city. Overall, there were really poor results. The South Florida area clearly owned the Florida SEO job market, with no other area really coming close.

Also created an image to illustrate how scares the job market is for Florida SEO’s.

South Florida definitely has the most amount of jobs for SEO’s according to Craigslist.

Some might say that Craigslist is the “bottom of the barrel” of job listings, but you’d be surprised how many top corporations post there.

An Explosion of SEO Companies in South Florida

The area our company is headquartered out of, Delray Beach FL is considered to be in the “South Florida” area of Florida. Miami to Palm Beach is pretty much considered South Florida.

Over the past few years, it seems that there has been an explosion of SEO companies in this area, as well as traditional firms starting to offer SEO as a service.

While many companies have succeeded at offering SEO as a service, many have failed. This is not an easy service to offer and I beleive you need to have a core group of SEO savvy individuals if you want to have a solid SEO department. 1 person is not enough. It takes a team of people to manage an SEO campaign.

Patrick Coombe is the founder and CEO of Elite Strategies Llc. Patrick takes a hands on approach to managing Elite Strategies and loves to get involved with technical projects relating to clients inbound marketing needs.